OTTAWA, Ontario - Canada’s health minister said Wednesday that a person in Alberta had died this week of the bird flu virus, the first known fatality from the illness in North America.

The minister, Rona Ambrose, and several public health officials, insisted that the death was an isolated case and posed little or no risk to the general public. They said that the victim did not appear to have contracted the H5N1 virus from human contact during a trip to Beijing last month and was unlikely to have passed it along when returning to Alberta.

“The risk of getting H5N1 is very low,” Ambrose told reporters in Ottawa.

Little is known about the victim, whose identity and hometown were not disclosed by officials, citing privacy laws. The person died in a hospital Friday, two days after returning from China. Laboratory tests confirmed H5N1 as the cause of death Tuesday evening.

Dr. James Talbot, the chief medical officer of health for Alberta, said that the patient did not have a cough or respiratory congestion associated with seasonal flu. Rather, the virus attacked the victim’s central nervous system, he told the Ottawa news conference by telephone.

He and other public health officials said that they believed the victim had become infected through exposure to birds.

The virus can be transmitted to humans through dried bird droppings or bird blood.

As a precaution, Health Canada, the federal health department, was contacting other passengers who had traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia, from Beijing on an Air Canada flight as well as travelers who were on a connecting flight to Edmonton, Alberta. They, along with the victim’s family and health care workers, are being offered Tamiflu, also as a precaution.

“We do not think that there was a risk to any individuals on the airplane,” Talbot said.